Social Innovation At Stanford’s GSB

How is the CSI integrated with the rest of Stanford?

We’ve mentioned the Ed School, and we also coordinate a lot with the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Science. The MBA program offers a dual degree for those who want to solve environmental problems; there are classes that are taught in the earth sciences school that we count for our CSI Certificate in Public Management.

A good deal of CSI instruction and mentorship is connected with the d. school in terms of design thinking. We coordinate a lot with the d.school–note that it’s not a school, it’s more like a program. One of the most popular examples is the class that GSB professor Jim Patell invented on extreme affordability; you have mechanical engineering students in that class as well as business students. This course is effective not just because it’s so interdisciplinary, but because it actually creates tangible things. There are very famous products that came out of the class, such as the Embrace Incubator. This product has received many awards—Stanford has dominated those awards for design and for products that have a social innovation impact.

What are some other products or companies that have come out of the CSI?

One example is the cellphone charging stove in Africa, allowing people who are cooking to make extra money by allowing neighbors to charge their cell phones in the stove–they are cooking anyway, so why waste that energy?

Another company that came comes out of Stanford’s ecosystem—and I would give more credit to the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies–that’s SoFi. It’s a great example of a for-profit company that is solving the problem of inefficiencies in the student loan market and access to education. They’ve even expanded into mortgages and other financial products.

That’s why we want to be very holistic about what we mean by social innovation. Just because you founded a for-profit finance company, it doesn’t mean that you are not actually solving problems that incumbents like those that student lenders have created. You can still solve these kinds of problems if you’re entrepreneurial—even if you are making a lot of money, which SoFi is.

What kinds of workshops and other resources do you have for students?

We have a boot camp for social entrepreneurship; we have various internship experiences where they can work very closely with social startups to see if this is something they want to do, and we have very good relationships with the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. That’s where we offer basic entrepreneurship training in terms of how to pitch ideas to investors, for example.

In addition to the boot camp, we have a social event to open the school year that gets the students together and advertises all of our services. We also have an event at the end of the year that historically was tied to a social investment fund—that’s where all students would give 1% percent of their summer salary so that students who were in the non-profit space could have a summer internship experience and still make a little bit of money. Because that effort is privately funded now, we’ve changed it from a fundraiser to a place where all the MBA students, not just the CSI students, can learn what their fellow students are doing and working on in this space.

So what do you tell people who say they want to be social entrepreneurs?

The big thing I focus on with social entrepreneurs is not like, “this is what you should be doing with your life or what you shouldn’t be doing,” but more, “if this is what you want to do, how we can give you the resources, or more importantly, how to guide you to pick the right tools to achieve what you want to do.”

Having said that, one thing we focus on is educating whether the for-profit or non-profit corporate structure matches their strategic goals. Because at the end of the day, the corporate structure is just a tool. Picking the right tool for you is what’s important.

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